«Introduction to the distributed search engine YaCy by two of the developers coming over from Germany.»

YaCy is a free search engine software that anyone can use to build a search portal for the internet or the private intranet. YaCy as internet search engine is fully decentralized, all users of the search engine network are equal, the network does not store user search requests and it is not possible for anyone to censor the content of the shared index. We want to achieve freedom of information through a free, distributed web search which is powered by the world’s users.

What we will show:

architecture of the system (showing: what does a search engine do, how can it scale, how can it be fully decentralized)

live demo (set-up, run a web crawl, decentralized searching, using the API)

hands on: YaCy can also do an indexing of intranet networks (without the shared public index) which we did at cccamp11 for about 250 files servers floating around at the camp. To reconstruct that at the workshop would be a nice hands-on exercise for everyone (if you like). Bring a server with open FTP and/or SMB service to try that.